


The Song My Bluebird Sings

by akaashiinperiodclothing (sirbeatrix)



Series: after Kitagawa Daiichi. [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friendship, Kitagawa Daiichi, M/M, Multi, Parental Abuse, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 10:15:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14542512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirbeatrix/pseuds/akaashiinperiodclothing
Summary: Kindaichi Yuutarou and Kunimi Akira meet Kageyama Tobio in elementary school. They befriend him through middle school and grow to love him before high school. Circumstances change before they can mend. In Kindaichi's POV.





	The Song My Bluebird Sings

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.  
> I was abused by my mother in the same way depicted in the story, and this is my first time applying the experience directly to a character.  
> If you yourself are going through the experience or know a friend who is going through the experience, do not hesitate to tell me; I will try to be of some comfort.  
> Comments are welcome.

I'm nine.

There's a boy standing near the swingset on the playground with a long-haired woman who my young mind identifies as his mother. He's around my age, eyes puffy with sleeplessness and wearing a thin dark coat with down feathers leaking from the seams. They're engrossed in a one-sided conversation, his mother doing most of the talking in a relentless monotone, not listening to her son's muted words. When he yells an insult I recognize, she hits him.

Too stunned to cry, he drags his fingers down his sunken cheek.

By this point, I'm running, catching myself as my cumbersome boots pirouette on beds of ice. Behind me, my best friend Kunimi meets my pace without effort, his breathing evanescent on the wind.

At our approach, the boy's mother retreats into the eerie landscape of withering trees encircling the elementary school's grounds. Raking my eyes down her back, I am at once aware of her threat to our peace. Her coat weaves around her legs, beige and radiating with a suffocating warmth, the dark mass of her hair billowing down her shoulders.

Later, I mark this as the first moment I wish death on a stranger.

"Are you okay?" I say.

His eyes fixed in wild incomprehension, the boy's voice falters before he answers.

"I'm alone."

He says this with no amount of mourning for a boy that never was.

Strapping him into my arms, I shake my head.

"You've got a friend. Promise." Disentangling myself from our embrace, I startle when Kunimi speaks.

"What's your name?"

Barring himself from the shrill whistles of the winter wind, Kunimi hugs his black tubular coat close to his chest, his dark swaths of hair gliding in tandem about his face.

"Kageyama," the boy says. His dark bangs slide in an even swoop down his tanned forehead. I sense a bottomless well of loneliness in his starlit eyes. It blossoms into formation, then, my plan to dry that well out.

"I'm Kindaichi," I say, "and he's Kunimi." 

My best friend doesn't mind when I introduce him. Years pass before he toes the tender inside of my ankle in reassurance, deflecting my assistance at a crowded party.

Kageyama closes his mouth into a controlled frown. "Can I call you Radish Head?" Without a doubt, the old me would have launched into a never-ending tussle of warring nerves and half-assed insults. But the need for a new me to emerge overrides the vengeance of my evil side. 

"If you forget my name," I say, "but not if you remember it."

From my steady searching of the trust embedded in his eyes, I find no need to worry. With one hand snuggled deep into the pocket of my parka, ice blue in the winter daylight, I latch my free arm through his and guide him into a world yet unknown to him: a world full of joy.

* * *

I'm thirteen.

By the beginning of middle school, we're calling each other by our first names. Something has evolved between the three of us, a nebulous and vulnerable possession of felicitous importance; we dare not grace it with a name for fear of our bliss fleeing.

From hours spent in the library, Akira and I learn that Tobio, much like the two of us, spends his idle periods drawing. We share with him our sketchbooks, our references, our techniques. He stores them in the catalogue of his head and shares with us his own. As it turns out, his style bears a keen resemblance to ours, his references contemporaries of our idols. Bookmarking tea-stained pages from oversized art books with broken spines, we gloss over our favorite works by Tissot, Manet, John Singer Sargeant.

Transported, we watch as Tobio borrows a page from Kunimi's sketchbook and a pen from myself and embarks on a sketch. So young, gifted beyond genius, an identity to his creation spooling from the ink in a series of detached flourishes. He need not think on it for the work to transpire. Gutting, wrenching the untrammeled core of my faith in my own skills, a creeping envy lures me down.

"Draw me, Tobio," I say. And he does, without once studying my face.

"Here you go."

Turning the paper over so that instead I am met with his first work, that of the sloppily categorized shelf filled with art texts, he hides his fierce smile in his eyes.

Flipping the page over, I regard myself in the mirror of his craft.

This alone grants a name to my felicitous fortune. In my solemnity, I keep my newfound secret to myself.

* * *

I'm fourteen.

Our art teacher, Ohnuki sensei, decides to sponsor our club for aspiring practitioners such as ourselves. Her gasps and reflections over Tobio's prowess mimic our own as we busy ourselves in the spacious quiet of the basement classroom.

Drawing one another, Akira and I enclose ourselves in a shared eternity of contemplation. Memorizing the subtle crescent of a dimple that deepens when he smiles at me under sleepy lids, the slightest movements of his dark hair as his breathing hushes through his lips, I sense his eyes wandering over to Tobio's station, rapt with a kind of overwhelming gratitude at another's contentment. To tell him I yearn to feel the same may backfire, so I go on teasing his essence out of my pen.

Hunched over on metal stools near a corkboard filled with oddities of inspiration, our backs ache. I cannot, nor shall I ever hope to continue. Akira's beyond the realm of the intangible.

"Yuutarou," Tobio says, his eyes flickering to me. "Come see my work."

His routine, developed through endless nights of exchanging our works, has been to show a sketch first to me and then to Akira. Neither of us question his deference to me, but I begin to consider he may value one of our opinions over the other. Tempering the swelling tide of flattery threatening to drown me, I meander to the steel worktable he's overtaken with his Prismacolor pastels (no books necessary), gazing pointedly at the drawing in front of him. 

Titled  _The Song My Bluebird Sings_ , he and I hold hands as we disappear into a background of unearthly aquamarine, our bodies ethereal though clothed in our most unbecoming black gakuran. Embracing us from behind, Akira rests his head on my shoulder.

Imagining their touches, fleeting, haunted, suffuses me in dreams of longing.

"What do you think?" Tobio says. Searching the spiraling pathways of my thoughts, he lodges his hand in mine. 

Drawing him up from his splintered workbench, I turn, gesturing for Akira to follow. 

We hurry as if on a featherbed of clouds from the liminal space, my feet leading me with reflexive memory to the library. Tightening his grip in mine, Akira brakes near the open glass doors.

His voice edged with a hardness that jumps in my skin, he says, "Can you keep your promise to me, Yuutarou?"

Tracing the bulbs of his knuckle with my fingertip, I nod once.

"And to Tobio?"

Facing Akira, his bottomless eyes surging with the promise of breathtaking nighttime explorations under the same moon, I ease against his forehead.

"Till death and then some."

Snaking around my waist, Tobio's arms pull me against him. His tears, sluicing down my gakuran, evaporate into softening laughter.

* * *

At the end of our fifteenth year, my world and Akira's short-circuit when Tobio's mother hits him again, this time not only in front of us but our classmates.

We alternate between the three of us in front of our artwork, on proud display for the annual showcase of Kitagawa Daiichi's foremost talents. Of course, Tobio's work belongs amongst the esteemed masters of their craft. Upon our learning that we have pieces included alongside those of our partner, Akira and I understand the selection as pity. Vehemently, over countless steaming buns and treats to bukupuku tea, Tobio argues otherwise.

Dressed in our single decent pairs of suits, black and creased, stiff around the elbows, we lace our hands together, neglecting offerings of beverages in favor of soothing warmth.

An unmistakable face shoots infrared flares through my head. Breaking my hold, I gaze at Akira with a nauseating dread before a middle-aged woman recovering from a bout of crying, her once glossy hair matted with tangles, grabs Tobio roughly by the shoulder and hits him hard enough to eject a wad of spit from his mouth.

This time, Iwaizumi, an upperclassman who on multiple occasions has come to our collective aid, holds Tobio to him and rushes him back to mine and Akira's outstretched arms.

"You didn't make it into fucking Shiratorizawa," his mother says. "What am I gonna say to your father?"

Rather than wait for an answer, she scrapes the heel of her ragged black shoe across the brilliant white floor as she careens through the now silent gatherings of onlookers, trapping herself in her threadbare beige coat.

"One of these days, you aren't going to have the last word," Iwaizumi says, loud enough to reverberate in bouncing echoes off of the decorated walls. Sighing through his teeth, he straightens the dented curve of his pinstripe collar, narrowing his level gaze on Tobio as he bunches his tousled spikes between his fingers.

"Promise me you'll remember what I'm about to say every day of your life, buddy: you don't have to love your parents." 

Overcome with a sensation he cannot name, Tobio nods, bursting into tears and holding Iwaizumi so close, he gasps.

"I love the hell out of you, kid," he says into Tobio's hair.

In that moment, I wish above all else to erase my existence, for not me but Iwaizumi has outlined my sacred solemnity into words.

* * *

After that night, grief unravels through Tobio's every action. Though he eats normally enough, attends our daily club meetings, follows Akira and I home before parting at the roundabout where the calla lilies blossom, I watch fragments of himself explode into dying nebulae. Constellations lose their shape in the sky. Comets forget their destinations.

He no longer shows us his work.

However, though none of us club members dare to admit it, he's become far more vocal with his opinions of our efforts.

"You can do so much better, Akira."

Our collective desire to defend the brunt of his condescension masquerading as criticism overpowers me in a maddening fizz in my brain. Slumped forward on his metal stool, his paintbrush poised at his easel, Akira's face contorts into a livid grimace.

"When did we ever ask for your help?" I say.

Before I can evaluate the dissolution of a mended heart, I crush the pulp into my hand, powerless to redirect its flow pouring in a viscous mass through my fingers.

"I'm going to ask you the same, Yuutarou."

Regret, tying me on a rack in an effort to string my limbs along until their bones snap, sizzles in my gut as Tobio rises from his worktable. A dangerous serenity lulls his voice into a rhythmic heartbeat, a consistent pulse in my chest. Yet his words thrum with agony, his mouth wriggling as he weeps soundless tears.

"I'm on my way to forgiving my mother. Her parents hurt her. They passed down those traits instead of the good ones."

From the corner of my eye, I sense Akira standing from his stool, trembling. Discarding my black pen onto the precarious shelf of my easel, I stumble to his quiet nook of the classroom, not once averting my eyes as I reach for his hand.

"I don't remember owing either of you an invitation to my pity party," Tobio says. Appalled at the shallowness of my thoughts, I permit myself the admittance: _I've never wanted to kiss him more_. "Now I can move on with my own strength."

He says the words with a mechanical precision as though he's reading them from a teleprompter.

"Did your psychiatrist say you need to ditch us at your consultation?" Akira says, spraying the words with his spit, willing his eyes to slice into Tobio's affected composure. His continuing would have embarrassed the old me, his voice straining against heaving sobs. But the old me's passed on to a sepia-tinted nostalgia, a useless daydream.

"Thank you," Tobio says, his fists curling against bulging pockets (filled with his devoted milk drinks no doubt), "but I don't need you anymore."

An unending river of sorrow issues floods of refuse through my soul. Torching the multitude with licking blue flames, boiling rage coats my vision in a crimson sheen.

Dragging Akira by the wrist, I clip past Tobio, launching every bit of hard-earned muscle into his shoulder.

" _Fuck_ you."

Wincing, he shrugs me off, tilting his head toward his seat. Throughout our progression to the library, I sense the heat of his stare on my back.

* * *

 

 

We learn the next day he's joined the volleyball club. Though his artwork remains, not once does he speak to us again.

 

_One Year Later_

Yuutarou's seventeen.

It's been one year since Tobio texted he and Akira. He still hasn't replied.

 

**_Hey. Can we meet up?  Please._ **

 

In his opinion, Akira had responded with the appropriate attitude.

 

**_You decide the time and place_ , _Tobio_.**

 

But he'd kept them waiting in favor of allowing Yuutarou to pretend he held no reservations about blowing him off.

His lips open on Akira's neck, he speaks into his collarbone.

"Let's call him already."

Levering himself on his hands from the heady comfort of Akira's arms and the undulating mattress of his boyfriend's bed, Yuutarou bends down to grab his phone from the pocket of his jeans on the floor.

Guiding him back into his arms, Akira plucks the black smartphone from Yuutarou's hand, blinking drowsiness from his eyes as he dials the number. Of course he'd kept it fresh, numbering the days till its use once again became rountine on the constellations.

On the third ring, Tobio answers.

"Can we start over?"


End file.
